1978 Chevrolet Camaro Macho Z - Throwback

The good news for the junior Hot Rod staff member was his surprising selection as new-car road tester. The bad news: This was the late ’70s, when nearly all new cars struggled like Los Angeles asthma sufferers to breathe and, consequently, sucked. As if emissions restrictions weren’t enough to strangle enthusiasm, along came the first gas crisis and a sudden doubling of petrol prices. My older colleagues, who’d been fighting for the keys to muscular test cars just a few years earlier, didn’t want the job—nor the pressure from Big Three advertisers expecting positive reviews in the Petersen publications they helped support.

2/11Except for the tires, everything pictured was in place the first and last time DKM’s prototype Camaro was featured in print, right down to the cardboard license plate that Dave attached 35 years ago. Heavy-duty coil springs were shortened 1½ inches to lower and stabilize the heavy nose.

It was forgettable slugs like these that sprang to mind last year when I received a message that the owner of a car that Hot Rod covered 35 years earlier was trying to track down the test driver for personal memories. Fearing painful flashbacks of a Chevy Citation X-11 (16.73/80.08) or Z28 (16.12/85.95) or 301ci Trans-Am (16.30/86.78), I blew it off. However, Jonathan Herrick is one persistent son of a gun, as we shall see. When an email followed with the subject “Macho Z Prototype,” I flashed on the fun I’d had with one particular killer Camaro, enough power-shifting fun, late one night, to earn the only moving violation of my three-year staff stint (as confessed in “More MachiZmo,” Hot Rod, Sept. ’78).

The revelation that any magazine test car had managed to escape either the crusher or subsequent power shifters seemed unbelievable, let alone the one-of-one Macho Z produced by DKM Performance (home of the highly regarded ’78-’80 Macho T/A series). Current pictures and documentation from DKM proved that the prototype I’d tested not only survived but still wore the original paint, interior, Hooker headers, dual-cat exhaust system, chrome rollbar, Koni shocks, recalibrated Quadrajet and distributor, aftermarket sway bars, Hurst shifter, Monocoque wheels, trunk-mount-battery hardware, 100-watt Fosgate Punch stereo, and complete, numbers-matching drivetrain—after 35 years and 95,000 miles! Even the radiator hoses are original. Of course, the four tires I’d tortured in 1978 are long gone, but you’d never know by looking. Somehow, Jonathan scored a full set of identical, date-coded Goodyear GT radials—removed from a wrecked ’78 Corvette Indy Pace Car after just 100 miles—that he reserves for show duty (preferring modern rubber for worry free cruising).

5/11“My wife swore she’d never ride in any car that screamed ‘Macho,’ but now that we own two of them, she’s warming up to it, I think,” says Jonathan.

Until recently, all Jonathan knew about the Macho Z was what he’d read in a Hot Rod article published while he was in first grade. Already the proud owner of a ’78 Macho T/A, he started his search at DKM Performance, which still maintains paperwork on every Machomobile produced in 1978-1980. Cofounder Dennis Mecham politely declined to reveal this one’s VIN (understandably) but remembered that someone had identified the prototype and written him in 2009. He hadn’t seen the Macho Z since shortly after I scraped multiple layers of rubber from its quarter-panels and returned the car to Chapman Chevrolet in Tempe, Arizona, the registered owner.

9/11Dave in the cockpit in 1978, and Jonathan in the same real estate 35 years later. The odo showed just 95,000 miles when Jonathan acquired it.

Though GM dealers of the era would not warranty new cars with anything but cosmetic modifications, DKM got around that by ordering F-Bodies through local Pontiac and Chevy dealers, making the mods, then selling new Machos back to dealerships to be sold as used cars. It didn’t hurt that Dennis and brother Kyle’s father, future Arizona governor Evan Mecham, owned a major Pontiac store. By now, GM’s upper management was undoubtedly aware of the Mecham boys’ much-publicized Macho T/A conversions of more than 200 new Trans Ams purchased from Dad’s Phoenix-area dealership. Evan’s extraordinary horsepower with GM’s brass apparently protected both Mecham Pontiac and the Mecham kids from factory interference. Thus did the boys feel empowered to expand their brand, briefly, to the seven underpowered 350ci Camaros that underwent similar conversions (this one ’78 Z-model, followed by six ’79 Berlinettas) before DKM returned its attention to making Macho T/As exclusively.

Where the car spent the next two decades remains unknown. [Help, readers? —Ed.] Jonathan’s first solid lead was an old posting in a supercar forum that described a mysterious white-on-red Z28 near San Antonio. Jonathan tracked down the writer, who emailed that the car had been stored locally ever since the owner died suddenly around 2009, and offered to put Jonathan in touch with the widow. “She’d parked it in her son’s barn because she and her husband both loved the car,” Jonathan learned. “They bought it from a lady she worked with in 2000 and drove it in parades. She didn’t want to sell and let somebody wreck it. I assured her that I wouldn’t want to restore it, just put it back the way it was and make things right. When I said that her Macho Z would live right next to the Macho T/A in my garage, she was tickled to death. I bought it sight-unseen and had it delivered to St. Louis.”

10/11

Says Jonathan, 41, “I guess I’m a throwback. I’ve got two kids, 9 and 11, who enjoy cruising in the car. It sounds dorky, but I love the chance to preserve history and tell a story about a prototype that almost nobody knows about. Dennis Mecham built some really cool cars during a dark age when the factories were pumping out terrible cars that ran horribly. For muscle-car people, this was one of the few bright spots in that era. DKM’s story deserves to be kept alive.”

11/11Dave in the cockpit in 1978, and Jonathan in the same real estate 35 years later. The odo showed just 95,000 miles when Jonathan acquired it.